No Love is Ever Wasted

Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching. —Satchel Paige

At one time or another we've all felt like Charlie Brown when he said, “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”

Perhaps a relationship or a friendship didn't work out and we feel abandoned or rejected. Or we loved someone only to realize that they weren’t what we thought they were. Sometimes the sorrow or the guilt is almost unbearable.

We gave so much of our heart—for what? Sometimes the answer, the “for what,” is in the pain itself.

“Your pain,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, “is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.“

When you are in pain because your love has been rejected, you can ask God to heal the hurt, to bless the one you have loved and to help both of you become more of your true self.

Most of all, you can ask God to show you why you are hurting.

Maybe we hurt because we expected something unrealistic in return for our love or we expected others to fill in the blanks in our own self-esteem—a job that only we can do by loving and nurturing ourselves. Maybe we were leaning on the human personality rather than seeking the spiritual essence that lies beyond the personality.

Whatever the source of the pain, if we pay attention to it, it can teach us.  The most important thing to remember is that no love is ever wasted.

“There is no unreturn'd love,” wrote Walt Whitman, “the pay is certain one way or another.”

No matter what happens, love is always worthwhile because every moment of loving brings us closer to the higher love our souls are seeking.

At the most fundamental level of our being, we are yearning to reunite with our divine lovers—God and our “twin flame.” Our twin flame is our “other half,” as Plato described it, our original partner who was created with us in the beginning.*

Twin flames have often been lured away from each other and temporarily detoured en route to their divine destiny together. These sidetracks have snared us into circumstances where we have created negative karma with others.

In many cases, we aren't free to be with our twin flame until we first balance these karmic debts with others. The only thing that will free us from these karmic entanglements is love.

So every morsel of love we give not only helps us balance our karmic debts, but it also brings us that much closer to reunion with our twin flame and with God. Realizing that love can help balance the debts we owe others has helped me see all kinds of relationships as learning experiences and opportunities to give more love, even if that love seemed to be rejected.

Bhakti Yoga – Devotion Leading to the Heart of God

Another way to look at our initiations of love is through the lens of bhakti yoga. In Hinduism, one of the four yogas (or paths to union with God) is bhakti, the yoga of divine love. Bhakti yoga is practiced in different ways, but at its essence it is devotion to God above all else—a devotion that leads to the heart of God.

Whenever we reach out to touch another, we are really sending the arrow of our love from our heart to God's heart. When we serve another—whether it's the confused child, the cranky co-worker or the eccentric elderly woman we help up the elevator—we are serving the God who lives within that one. In essence, we are surrendering to a higher love.

If we practice seeing beyond the outer personality of the one we are serving to the real goal of our love (God), we will realize that our love for anyone and everyone is really a reflection of our love for God. After all, it was God who we were in love with from the beginning to the ending. Not only that, but when we love, it is God who is loving through us.

Each one of us wears a mask, in a sense, and behind the mask is the living presence of the Spirit. God disguises himself so that we have many, many opportunities to give our love back to him by loving all these different manifestations and expressions of the Spirit. The mask itself may be seemingly imperfect, yet we know that the Lord of Love lives within. In reality, love comes from only one source, and we can be grateful that many people in our lives have been beautiful instruments of that divine love.

So when you feel a painful loss and you ask yourself, “I gave so much of my heart—for what?” ask yourself another question: “Who and what have I really loved?”

If you allow yourself to go deeply enough, the answer will be: “All the while I was really loving the Spirit who abides within that one. The beauty and intensity of your love could not possibly have been the love for the outer self. In reality, you loved the soul and the spiritual essence expressing itself in and through that person. And that kind of love is never wasted. It is the love of God.”

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Excerpt from Alchemy of the Heart: How to Give and Receive More Love, by Elizabeth Clare Prophet